An educator's guide to sustainability with young learners

Nature Did It First!

One great way to celebrate our planet is to highlight all the wonderful ways nature has inspired human technologies. Biomimicry is when we look to nature for inspiration and innovation for our own tools, buildings, even art. If millions of years of natural variation and random selection have led to efficient and beautiful solutions to our everyday problems, why not imitate evolution’s designs?

This book Nature Did it First!introduces young ones to ways that animals thrive in the wild using tricks we thought we invented!

You can challenge your students by reading this book backwards and having them guess which modern convention was inspired by the natural phenomenon on the page. For example: What does this termite nest looks like? What do we use that’s like the long proboscis that the butterfly collects nectar with?

Or you can have them view the modern object first and guess which animal did it first! For example: Do you know of an animal that has a scissor-like mouth? Which animals are able to give themselves showers?